New Zealand is protesting to North Korea after two of that country's boats were found fishing illegally in the Antarctic's Ross Sea, Foreign Minister Murray McCully said Thursday, dpa reported.
"The detection of these illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing vessels in the Southern Ocean is of grave concern to New Zealand," McCully said in a statement.
He said the two boats, sighted by a Royal New Zealand Air Force maritime surveillance plane in February, were fishing in the area managed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.
One was using deep-sea gillnets, which are banned in the area.
McCully's statement said both ships were believed to be already on the commission's blacklist but had been re-named as the Xiong Nu Baru 33 and Sima Qian Baru 22.
Under the blacklist, the commission's 25 members ban the ships from access to their ports and will not import any fish caught by them.
Fisheries Minister Phil Heatley said that illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing posed a severe threat to the sustainability of valuable toothfish stocks and had caused considerable environmental damage in the Southern Ocean.